


After the war

by Bitterblue



Category: Orphan Black (TV), Sense8 (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-15
Updated: 2015-06-15
Packaged: 2018-04-04 12:29:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4137594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bitterblue/pseuds/Bitterblue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sense8 and Orphan Black crossover fic, messing with the timelines somewhat. Cosima, Amanita, Nomi. A character study of Cosima after the end of OB.</p>
            </blockquote>





	After the war

1\. After the war, you cease to exist.

It isn't technically that you don't exist, really, and it isn't technically that it was a war. Not really. (You wonder if it can be a war if no one wins, no one comes out happy, because winning would at least make the last few years worth it.) The you who answered the phone to find a woman on the line claiming to be your clone is gone, though, just as if she'd died, and the you who is left is unsteady on her feet.

For a while you live in Toronto, with not-Alison and not-Helena and not-Sarah, who have ceased to exist, too, and it's there you find that you really like children.

Shame about the ovaries, after all.

You lie in bed at night and miss Delphine and the shape your lives could have been together. You had talked about after a few times (after the cure, after your PhD, after DYAD), warm in the dark in Felix's loft. (You  _miss_  Felix with an ache almost as hard as missing Delphine, a pair of holes in what is left of your soul that take up so much space you are more  _nothing_  than  _soul_  these days.)

Delphine hadn't wanted children, and at the time you hadn't, either, not with the prions and DYAD and kidnappings. And you still don't, not exactly, but you like being around Kira, and Gemma and Oscar, and Charlotte. They remind you what wholeness feels like.

2\. After you cease to exist, you have to become someone else.

The idea of leaving your sisters hurts, which is how you decide to do it: hurt is better than emptiness, and emptiness is all you feel, three years after the war. You never officially withdrew from Minnesota, so you get in contact again and ask about credit transfers. It's a very pleasant surprise when Berkeley agrees to accept your generals and let you into the lab.

The woman on the phone isn't exactly  _un_ helpful when you ask about getting your name changed on all of your previous coursework, until you drop in a comment about domestic violence. (And it's not a lie, not really, not when your own brothers hunted you and your family was torn apart.) You already have a name picked out. She's not using it anymore anyway. You tell the woman Grace Johanssen.

Grace Johanssen moves to Oakland (because it's cheaper and she is not easily scared after not-winning at everything else life has thrown her way), enrolls at Berkeley as a PhD prospective student, cuts her hair into a pixie (Delphine had liked your dreadlocks and you don't want to be anything Delphine had liked now that you're Grace), and with time you find the edges of this new you and the old you, before Beth and DYAD and Delphine and Sarah, start to blend together. Science is comforting. Procedural. If this, then that. It's a lie.

Cosima might have cared. Grace does not.

3\. After you become someone else, your life shifts to catch up.

You still like kids, which is maybe a weird holdover from the time just after the war when you didn't exist, or maybe a weird sentiment that came attached to your name, or maybe just a product of getting older. Your biological clock has never ticked, per se, but your friends at the university are all parents by now, and you were one of the oldest in your cohort. It might have worked in your favour, since you suspect you got this rare tenure-track spot not  _just_  on the merits of your work (maybe a little bit on the merits of your barren womb, late thirties and single, no kids). You think it would have bothered you, before. Not now.

It's early evening when the agency calls you and tells you they have a baby that needs foster care. You've only just finished the training and you were kind of expecting an older child, but you say yes without considering it. Yes, over the phone, yes, of course you'll be there as soon as BART allows.

The baby is tiny and beautiful and you are in love at first sight.

She clings to you and you know right then that she will slide herself into all of the holes in your soul and grow and grow and grow. You don't call her anything except baby for the first three weeks before you give up and call her Amanita.

4\. After your life shifts, you discover it has not.

Amanita makes you reach out to your sisters again after too many years of silence (because it was easier to be someone else with a continent and silence between you), because you cannot imagine her growing up without them. It's uneasy, at first, because of the silence and the distance and the fact that you don't exist anymore, but she is a good baby and they understand this fierce love you do  _not_  understand but is happening to you all the same.

She grows and grows and fills all the holes in your soul until you can remember the people you lost without feeling it ache in your bones, so you tell her about Delphine and Felix and S and Cosima. (You don't tell her you were that person, once, because some things still sting.) She learns  _everything_  from her aunts and her cousins.

When the adoption finalizes, you visit Toronto.

You manage to stay the whole week, as planned, without a panic attack. You don't mention that you can taste the phantom blood in your mouth, can smell the antiseptic smell of DYAD in the back of your throat.

5\. After you discover it has not, you guard your heart.

Your heart is Amanita, so you guard her. Not so well she can't get out if she wants. Not so well no one can get in. But well enough that you don't notice the more than friendly smiles from her eleventh grade English teacher, or the single mom at her jazz band practice.

Amanita herself keeps her heart open, and you'd think it was some genetic failing to go through life this way if you were biologically related. You wonder if you somehow infected her with this optimism, if it crept under her baby skin when she was too young to resist. She brings home people all the time, friends and more than and in between, a parade of people all in love with Amanita.

You know, though, when she brings this woman home that this time it's different. She stands awkwardly, like she's not sure why her limbs are as long as they are, and her smile is nervous. Her hair reminds you of Delphine, when you were both just graduate students and no one was a spy, but nothing else about her does. You like her immediately. It's easy to--she is  _smart_  and kind and she has holes in her soul that you know well, and she is happy to let Amanita fill them and grow and grow and grow. You tell her about your brother, once, and she relaxes at last.

When Amanita tells you Nomi needs help, Nomi is being hunted by scientists, Nomi is part of a group of people who are special, you don't ask questions. You don't have to. You only say  _yes_  and  _I'm ready to help_.

You have already ceased to exist. And you know how to fight this fight.


End file.
